Explore Your Child's Interests

..finally a journey he wants to tread...

My seven year old son gets easily bored on many of the subjects I teach him in homeschool. As of now, the same thing is happening as he enters regular school set up. Relatively, the loss of focus contributed by his supposed "ADHD" is causing him to lose interest in something that is repeated to him every now and then. Don't get me wrong... I am pretty sure he is a bright child, but like any other children with ADHD, he easily gets distracted hence gets easily bored on subjects that are not responding to his interest.

For so long, I have been at a loss on how to get his attention, how to make him stay and write what I am asking him to complete.

Then one afternoon, when I was really close to just burning up and giving up on teaching him, I thought of doing the process another way. I decided to ask him to draw vegetables and fruits, just for the sake of identifying them and naming them for our arts and language subject. He finished the activity so fast that I did not know what to do next.

Just to add in to the activity, I thought of asking him to animate the fruits he made. To make a story out of whatever he has created. I left him and after 30 minutes, he did come up with a story. A part of his learning situation is the fact that when he wants something, he finishes it fast and asks for something more; something I needed to constantly give attention to.

When he finished it, he said "I'm done ma', what more should I do"....

When he says those words, I knew he wanted something more and I kind of want to hold that particular interest while it lasted.

I then decided to teach him how to get his worm in pictures, have them uploaded in the computer and create a powerpoint presentation out of it. So far, these pictures show the output of his work. From designing to encoding, it was all his hard work.. and I am quite proud of the fact that he took interest in the activity and enjoyed it as much as I did.

sorry... I'm not quite familiar on how to post powerpoint presentations on the hubs.. so I took the liberty of getting screen shots of each slide and posting them as photos :)

I learned so much from this particular activity.

Although our son goes to a traditional school now, we still make it a point, that his homeschool curriculum remains in tact just to make sure that he gets the learning he deserves and specifically need especially considering his case. This activity probed me that at times, teaching a child does not only depend on how the parent actually wants to impart the lesson but also on how the student, or the child actually wants to receive the learning at his own pace.

The system worked much better when I tried to seek out how he might want to learn in a more effective way, than consistently insisting on my own process. He learned more, he enjoyed more and its something he could consider as his own accomplishment.

True, parents who homeschool or at least support the study-activities of their children at home are faced with the challenge on how to get the attention and interest of the children. Relatively, such conditions call for specific adjustments that parents should be willing to accept and work on with their children. Sometimes, we as parents have to accept that our ways may not be as effective when it comes to our children's learning needs. True, they are our children, but still, they have different ways of learning, different ways of absorbing lessons and different capacities of applying such lessons into actual life.

Perhaps this is something every parent should realize; that at some point, learning becomes more effective when it is accustomed to the process of the learner....